I Don't Want to Care
by meenist
Summary: The eyes he encountered were so deeply blue—black if Miharu hadn’t known better—so earnest. The wall of Death that Yoite constructed was flimsy. Exhaustion and wistfulness were legible in a gaping pupil.


Again, seeing Yoite was like seeing him for the first time. Absence would always warp Miharu's senses, make him feel as if he had gained some semblance of understanding. Yet there Yoite stood before him, as aloof as a dark winged thing, looking down at him from the perch of repressed nightmare.

"Good evening," he announced gently, expectantly. There was a ghost lurking in the back of his throat, unthreading his vocal cords and leaving him with little more than a whisper to share.

Miharu faltered at first, but Yoite was as impassive and still as glass. He wouldn't tell him that he hadn't gotten any closer to the scrolls. That would leave them entirely aimless, perhaps even excite Yoite's short temper. No, Yoite's rage was a sleeping creature that Miharu hoped never to rouse. It could wake in a moment. It would kill in an instant. But neglecting to mention the scrolls gave them nowhere to connect. Nothing to discuss. Yoite's eyes wandered away, came back again.

Miharu put on a wide grin, startling the gaze into fleeing again. It didn't deter him. Instead, he waited. Maybe it would only be a moment before Yoite truly responded. Silent man that he was, he seemed to have some trouble doing nothing at Miharu's side. Then, after many long moments of nothing, Miharu dropped his smile. Yoite noticed this.

"Yoite," Miharu was embarrassed of his own tone, at the weakness of it, but Yoite had given his full attention to the call and he could not stop now.

"Do you want to take a walk?"

He nearly sensed an affirmative on Yoite's thin lips, but then, as his focus drifted away from Miharu again, "Not really."

"Oh."

Yoite, deep within his high collar, hidden under the brim of his hat, remained in silence. Miharu could only see his face because he was so short, and even then the shadows clung to all but the bridge of his nose. It was a sharp, cold nose, and it turned down and towards him now.

"For a minute," Yoite murmured. An amendment to his decision? He walked closer, very close, passed Miharu without brushing him. He began to walk. The air that trailed him rustled Miharu's hair and reminded him to blink his wide eyes. He did a quick about-face and hurried, despite his sluggish tendencies, to follow.

"When the sky is like this," Yoite began quietly. Miharu's ears perked, his surprise at Yoite's voice veiled in dark hair. "It makes me tired. Like the air is heavy, and then so am I."

"Mm," Miharu confirmed, paying close attention to the humidity, closer attention to Yoite and his words, trying to decode them. Yoite was like a wraith, moving silently, fluidly, but there was some exhaustion hanging about him still. Miharu would not reach out to steady him. It wasn't Yoite's power that he feared—the Shinigami needed him after all. It was the fear of himself. Of breaking the boundaries of what it meant to know another person in his life. There would be no support, no touching. There could be no closeness lest he cause another to truly care for him. Why he assumed that Yoite could care was almost beyond his comprehension.

Lost in his reflections, Miharu had begun to walk more slowly. He only noticed that Yoite had paused in wait for him when he'd knocked a tightly wrapped arm. Jerking back into reality, he looked up apologetically. It would have melted a lesser being.

"Sorry," he said.

Their location came slowly into focus. Yoite's home, the abandoned train car overrun with bamboo. Miharu hadn't noticed how quickly Yoite had led him there. When he had suggested a walk he'd really meant one within the crowded confines of the town nearby. Or had he? The peacefulness of this damp place gave him some kind of comfort, a sense of safety. Yoite had paused just outside the car to watch the path behind Miharu. He seemed to be scanning it for stray hearts, seeking the release of an eternal peace.

Miharu frowned. Not for the first time he imagined the difficulty of living with the ability to end a life at a whim. At the expense of one's own life. While many would point out the carelessness with which Yoite used Kira, Miharu could see now the anxiety in Yoite's eyes. This so-called monster feared an encounter with any person who truly sought death. He didn't want to kill anyone.

Yoite was staring at him.

"Come in," he invited. He disappeared around the corner of the entrance.

Miharu stood there a moment longer, listening to Yoite's receding footsteps. The car creaked; he must have taken a seat inside. For an instant Miharu's heart urged him to run away. He feared the Kira-user. Yoite might have decided that extracting the Shinrabansho by force was the only answer after all. By killing him, by drinking his blood, by strangling his life away—he might be able to obtain that tool with which to obtain his freedom.

Miharu set his jaw and stepped into the car. Somehow, it was as if the fog and heaviness had been too afraid to enter this place. The air was clean and light, and the only indication of the weather was in the high opacity of the window glass. Yoite was sitting on the far side of the car with his head more or less between his knees.

"Yoite," he couldn't help but call out to him. Anything to move him from that depressed posture. To his surprise, Yoite lifted his head.

"There's not much time," he reminded him, removing his hat. The hair underneath was smooth, black, ragged at the edges where the exhaustion showed, where Kira was visible.

Miharu chose not to answer, instead he sat across from him on the faded plush bench. He watched the floor between his knobby knees. For a moment, they seemed as if they belonged to someone else. These knees could not possibly be his. If they really had been his knees, they wouldn't have taken him into the train car. They would have been supporting him behind the grill at home.

"This morning," Yoite continued quietly, "before the sun rose, I was going to come to you."

Miharu's throat swelled. He could only express his interest with his eyes, take shallow breaths. Yoite was looking at him and seemed to read his intention with ease.

"I had almost forgotten how you must have been asleep."

"You don't sleep well?" Miharu blurted, sounding like an anxious child, having asked the question that was on his mind but oppressed by courtesy for so long. It tumbled out inappropriately now.

Yoite studied him. His gaze was sharp and unsettling. Miharu met it with his own only because he forced himself to grow careless. The eyes he encountered were so deeply blue—black if Miharu hadn't known better—so earnest. The wall of Death that Yoite constructed was flimsy. Exhaustion and wistfulness were legible in a gaping pupil.

"I have trouble sleeping," Yoite shared almost casually, though Miharu watched him sink visibly into memory, no doubt in some recollection of sleeplessness. He imagined Yoite lying prone on the bench, his troubled brows knit in bad dreams. His cap clenched between gloved hands. Or perhaps Yoite was a sentinel, forever standing at the entrance to his empty cave. Watching the night for an indication of trespass.

No, when Yoite was alone he was only painfully aware. And now, evening the presence of another, Yoite began to slip so deeply into his own isolation that he nodded off. His eyes, closed. His breath, governed by parted lips. Miharu looked away politely, as he would from something indecent.

Yoite slept on his side, his arm hung limply over the seat's edge. Alarm never came to Miharu, for the rise and fall of Yoite's winding torso never ceased. In the quiet, Miharu wondered whether he should leave. He wondered whether Yoite would take offense to his presence, or to his absence. He sat there, swinging his legs, hands folded in his lap, no sound but the swishing of his jean capris, of the groaning car, of…

Miharu's swinging came to an abrupt pause…Yoite's breath… it was rising, cresting, declining. Coming in slow, heavy revolutions, whistling sometimes between his teeth. Miharu almost saw the air as it disappeared within him and came flourishing out again. He could hear the slightest wheeze, the indication that even his lungs demanded healing.

He could not look away. Yoite was a mystery, full of secrets . Miharu found that when this illusionist slept, he left very few of those secrets behind to protect him. His physical state was clear. Warn, hard, afraid. Alone.

Miharu understood for the first time that Yoite was hopelessly alone.

The thought was enough to move him. He came down from his seat and knelt on the floor beside him, careful to be light on his feet. Shock hit him when he saw how close he had gotten. There was little between him and the sleeping murderer—little more than damp ribbons of black hair and hundreds of pores, tiny holes that breathed as Yoite breathed, that glistened faintly with sweat.

Should he reach to smooth the hair away? It would have been his first reaction, possibly the first impulse of anyone who had seen a Death God so close. He was only a lock of hair away from the long, black lashes on a face that he assumed no one had dared to touch. Not so unlike himself. His own cheeks tingled where he'd missed human contact for so long.

But Miharu thought now only of Yoite, minus the labels and the anxieties that had been pinned upon his breast. Yoite was no spectacle, no untouchable creature. Maybe he was, but Miharu struggled not to understand. He didn't want to need this. To need to understand anything. To grow attached to anything or any person.

"Mm…f…"

Yoite's dreams, ghosted on his lips, gave Miharu an undecipherable thrill somewhere between fear and anticipation. A nightmare, plaguing Yoite? No, his breathing was too slow and sure for that. A good dream, then? Somehow Miharu doubted that as well. It was almost as if Yoite dreamed of the present, of the moment at hand. As if he wasn't even…

"Yoite," Miharu whispered. "You aren't asleep."

Yoite's brows tightened slightly, drawing lines in an otherwise seamless visage. When his eyes fluttered open they seemed to unleash a penetrating search light, an accusatory air. Miharu felt himself blush, but his determination did not waver.

"Miharu," his name spoken through the throat of Death Himself, ragged, soft, merciless. Miharu waited.

"I don't have much time left."

He wasn't spurring him to hurry with the scrolls. Laying there, cheek distorted almost adorably against the seat cushion, Yoite was making conversation. Even if that conversation was a reminder of his looming mortality, it was a personal statement. And he had shared it, willingly, with Miharu.

"I know," Miharu said. Was that sadness in his voice? No, he couldn't be sad about this. It didn't concern him, not past the rescue of his friends. He was a pawn because he chose to be for the sake of others. Never did his deal with Yoite include any curiosity into his pain.

"When you grant my wish…" Yoite trailed off, seeking the dialogue within his own mind, void of Miharu.

"You'll have never existed," Miharu finished anyway.

Yoite's eyes, which had unfocused, took hold of him now. The relief in them was frightening. Being comforted at the thought of death? Not even. At the prospect of becoming an absolute non-entity. He wanted to ask Yoite 'why' more than ever now. As if suspecting of his desire, Yoite began the sluggish process of sitting upright and removing himself from their close proximity. Miharu didn't pursue him. Questioning Yoite could do nothing but destroy the weak thread between them. The unspoken boundaries they never would cross with one another.

Yoite began to collapse. On impulse, Miharu threw himself in the way of the fall. The older boy's body hit him like a hot, heavy, electric machine, knocking him back to his knees while the brunt of his weight rested on Miharu's chest. Miharu's heart seized, his muscles locked. Why had he done such a thing? Never had Yoite and he touched but in violence. Yoite, too, began to tremble.

"Yo-"

Yoite's body began to convulse as he wheezed, gasped, and coughed up a handful of fresh blood. Though he'd thrown a glove up to his mouth, evidence of the pain had already spattered Miharu's shoulder, part of his neck. The blood was very warm, somehow in no way repulsive but only terrifying. Part of Yoite's life rested against his flesh now, absorbing slowly.

"Miharu," it was the gentlest, most pleading sound Miharu had ever heard directed towards him. And then Yoite pushed him away quite harshly, powerful even in his weakened state. Miharu hit his backside hard on the car floor, too frightened even to brace for impact. Yoite withdrew, gasping behind a hand and his tattered hair. "Go."

Miharu stared.

"GO."

He jerked to his feet in an instant. "Yoite," he near sobbed, but it was gentle, perhaps Yoite hadn't noticed. No, one wide blue eye had fixed itself on him, noticed him, seemed terrified of the sound of his own name.

"I will come to you again. Go now."

There was nothing Miharu could do but obey. His memory framed the Shinigami's condition and posted it at the forefront of all his thoughts. There was no mistake now. The connection had been made. The hot blood on his neck had begun to dry and remind him of his own body. Yoite wouldn't look at him, wouldn't speak, only curled up and turned far, far away. Miharu left the car. There was one motivation jumpstarted in his heart now.

Yoite….


End file.
